margaret king

Waaay too much

Revisado: 06-13-22

I was looking forward to this title because I enjoyed Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII but found this one frustrating beyond belief. The narrator has a good voice for normal text but she uses accents (such as Italian) and tones (such as pompous or childish) when she is reading a direct quote. The effect is horrible.
As far as the book goes, it is not an easy listen. There are a LOT of names and titles. Way to much for an ordinary reader imo.
Overall experience is not pleasant - even though I struggled to about halfway before giving up.

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Excruciating for all the wrong reasons

Revisado: 12-10-18

Gripping story-telling (The Guardian) and a pitch-black novel (The Independent). That's what a couple of newspaper reviews said about Mercy. The reason I looked was that this is the second Audible book in a row that I have found intolerably bad, so I was wondering whether others had the same reaction or whether I'm just have a bad month/year/life.
It seems as if I am in the minority -- perhaps a minority of one -- because I just don't get the appreciation.
Mercy is excruciating: dull characters, banal dialogue and failure to launch from a promising premise.
Am I the only listener who found the comedic portrayal of Assad racist, both in the writing and the recording?
I managed to listen to about three hours out of the full 13 and a half, so perhaps it fell together into a fascinating and complex storyline by the end, but I doubt it: weak writing is a pre-existing condition with no miracle cure.

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Is this artificial intelligence?

Revisado: 12-07-18

Belinda Bauer is an outstanding writer who is able to conjure up complex, nuanced characters, which makes this book all the more puzzling because it is tedious and superficial.
It is almost as if a machine learning program wrote a novel based on all Bauer's books and called it Beautiful Dead.
How else can the writer account for creating characters that invite so little engagement? And for putting them in a storyline that is utterly uncompelling and that elicits from this reader a feeling akin to feedback from a mic.
The protagonist's father has dementia -- a brave choice for the writer because she has to find a way to convey a family member's experience of this without making the reader want to throw down the book in frustration.
In Tokyo Year Zero, David Peace has the skill to maintain engagement while inflicting considerable discomfort on the reader. (It's not dementia in Tokyo Day Zero but I won't say more for fear of spoilers.) Sadly, Bauer has not have the skill.
She could also take pointers from other works by Peace on how to create an unlikable journalist who traffics in death but who negotiates a complex moral universe. (Hint: the moral universe should be more complex than that of undergraduate fridge poetry.)
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the emperor has no clothes

Revisado: 05-21-18

High-minded people may say we do not need to know about the president's eating habits and peccadillos to understand the political dynamics of the Trump presidency. True, but few of us are not fascinated by the chaos, lunacy, sheet incompetence and back stabbing that goes on behind closed doors. Well done, Michael Wolff. We already knew the emperor has no clothes, but in these difficult and dangerous times it is helpful not only to have a journalist shout this out repeatedly but to point in forensic detail at what the nakedness exposes.

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worth a few reads

Revisado: 05-21-18

Thanks to Luke Harding for adding to the body of work that is helping us understand the White House today. The book requires a level of concentration -- it's not a something to listen to while distracted -- but it is well worth the effort. The author knows what he is writing about and delivers it with a punch.

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An essential experience

Revisado: 05-21-18

Lisa Hall captures the details of an abusive relationship with empathy and a delicate touch. Sal seems almost too detached, too sweet, too compliant but who am I to judge appropriate behaviour in an abused person? It would be a good but unremarkable book but for the end, which is masterful and will, in a small or not so small way, change the way the reader views the world. For this reason I have rated the book overall five stars -- it is greater than the sum of its parts. It will be a hard act to follow but I look forward to Lisa Hall's next book.

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ham handed

Revisado: 05-21-18

I feel cheated by this preposterous tale. Audible's own review says "If you like Gillian Flynn and Girl on the Train" you will love The Reunion, which is "packed full of twists and turns..." It gives the idea that The Reunion is gripping and surprising, doesn't it? Except the suspense is painfully contrived and the red herring gallumphs through the story line with the elegance and subtlety of an sunburned seal. Why did I keep listening for 12 hours? Because the review implies that in the end it will all be worth it for the big reveal, even as this reader began to wonder halfway through where, exactly, all the twists and turns were.
Not only do I feel cheated of 12 hours of listening, but I no longer believe I can take Audible's summaries of its murder and crime books on trust. I've seen the "if you like Gillian Flynn and Girl on the Train (or insert other popular writers here)" line before in Audible's blurbs and it has now become a sign of vague desperation on Audible's part: we can't keep coming up with enough really good psychological thrillers to meet the demand, so we will rely on the success of others to punt books that really don't deserve to be published in the first place.

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Trite

Revisado: 03-03-18

A fair number of listeners have rated this book highly, so don't take my review to heart unless you like your mysteries really dark. Sure, in Silent Child bad things (really bad) happen to good people, but that doesn't make it dark. Dark is when all the characters are flawed and broken and if there is redemption it is only partial.
The premise is interesting and has heaps of potential, but sadly the characters are two dimensional, the motivation is thin and the psychology flawed. The story labors to an exasperating, inelegant conclusion shedding credibility along the way.
But, as is often the case with Audible, the narration is excellent.

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Three times and counting

Revisado: 11-23-16

Authoritative and measured, Ian Kershaw recounts the arc of Hitler's life in a way that is accessible to observers of history. I have listened to the book three times -- it is fairly dense and I struggled at times to keep track of unfamiliar German names -- and each time it has been more enlightening. No doubt I will listen to it again.

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From hero to herpes

Revisado: 06-10-16

No jobs in Northern Ireland, no peace and no hope. No decent plot lines either, apparently, and not ability to create dramatic tension or keep this reader involved.
I think McKinty is a good writer and loved the first in The Troubles series, The Cold, Cold Ground -- anyone who names his novels after Tom Waits songs has a lot going for him.
But this second in the series, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, is a major letdown. Main character Sean Duffy's f-you attitude is still there but the storyline is scratchy so it's not worth waiting around for the resolution. There is no one in the story I could care about except perhaps the main character and we have a pretty good idea that he is going to suffer a lot of pain but not actually die.
And okay it is set in the 80s but the author's attitude to women is just retarded.
As always, Gerard Doyle does a brilliant job with the narration, which pushes the overall rating up a notch, but if you enjoyed the first of this series I would suggest you skip this one.
Would I try another McKinty novel? Perhaps I will, because he seems to be a prolific writer so there is a lot of choice and having read one good book and one bad has not yet set a pattern.

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